Firefox haters go to a whole new level

I stumbled on a story for TECH.BLORGE.com last night that I spent far more than my normal amount of time on. You can click the link to see the final product.

Earlier this month a new website popped up named WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com. It boils down to a guy hates Firefox because of *one* extension, Ad Block Plus because he can’t figure out how to write a script to get around it and still show his oh so precious ads on his site. And as a wannabe web designer, you know it makes sense to build a website about your hatred of the second most popular browser on the market. Just says to me that your kung-fu is lacking, but what do I know, I only run eight websites.

His reasoning why this isn’t an insane move, and actually makes sense from a financial point of view?

Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..

Really? “… a somewhat small percentage”? That fascinates me. Looking at the statistics for this site, I show Firefox accounts for 37.89% of my visitors from July 18th – August 17th. Over on AnimeUSA.com, for the same time period, it was 35.77%. So, with either of my two main sites, well over 1/3 of visitors are Firefox users and that amounts to “a somewhat small percentage”, nice to know.

Apparently his ads are so precious to him, it is better to block Firefox and reduce the number of eyeballs on your content. It is supposedly the content that draws a person to a website, but this gentleman seems to have it reversed and seeing his ads are that much more important. He does goes into a long winded argument about how blocking ads is tantamount to theft and violates copyright laws, and just like you shouldn’t skip television ads, you shouldn’t skip his ads, so it’s better just to block you and yada yada yada… he goes on and on about it.

In the course of writing my story, I contacted the owner of the site to allow him the opportunity to expand his thoughts, but all that garnered me was personal insults for my lack of ability to read, and insults to the majority of Firefox users (the general comments are documented in the article… not the personal ones).

“Based on the emails and phone calls from Firefox users over the past 24 hours, Mozilla could serve their users best by offering literacy classes, since not one person who has emailed or called has demonstrated even a basic level of reading comprehension,” Carlton said.

“I’m sure there are some intelligent Firefox users out there (I know a few) but I am baffled why Mozilla seems to be most vocally represented by foul-mouthed crackpots and deadbeats.”

Wow… I wasn’t aware my use of Firefox says things about my intelligence. Good to know. Course, with Firefox users making up “a somewhat small percentage” of Internet users, he couldn’t have been contacted by THAT many people… right?

Be sure to drop by his blog at JackLewis.net (there’s some long story behind the name I don’t care to repeat), unless you’re using Firefox, then you just end up at WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com because you really need to see his 500 Amazon Associate links and Google AdSense ads.

For the record, I am a Firefox user, but I do not have Ad Block Plus installed, and yes, I am foul mouthed, but only in person.